The critique of the ways of investigation on theories of mind. The strategies used by children copying with understanding mental states on metaphors The researches on children’s ability to understand mental states as reasons of people’s behavior are usually conduct in false belief paradigm (Wellman, Cross i Watson, 2001; Flavell, 2000). The article presents the critique of this classic method and the research employing new procedure called metaphors’ test. Metaphors’ test enables to examine children’s mentalizing ability and simultaneously to analyze cognitive strategies used by children when they have to understand metaphor in order to perceive mental state of another person. The aim of this analysis was to verify main theses of the Siegler (1996) overlapping waves theory in the domain of children’s theories of mind. We examined 109 children aged from 3 years and 5 months to 5 years 11 months (the mean age was 59 months). Tested children have to solve 15 items of metaphors’ test. The children was randomly assigned to one of three groups. There were no cues in the control group but in two experimental groups two different kinds of hints were used. First of all, the obtained results indicate that the ability to perceive mental states on the material of metaphors develops with age (r = 0,36 on p < 0,001). Secondly, the analysis of strategies used by children in metaphor test provide the prove to state that the frequency of using some strategies changes with age. It means that there is a transition from realism to mature, mentalistic understanding of inner states.
